“I got him, Heimie! I got him! Where are ya?”
Simon saw the close-cropped bullet head for one instant clearly, lifted in black silhouette against the swimming stars. He swung up the useless automatic which he was still clutching and smashed it fiercely into the silhouette, and the grip on his head weakened. With a new surge of power the Saint heaved up and rolled them over again, straddling the cursing man with his legs and hammering the butt of his gun again and again into the dark sticky pulpiness from which the cursing came…
A rough hand, which did not belong to the man underneath him, essayed to encircle his throat from the rear, and Simon gathered that the full complement of the opposition was finally gathered on the scene. The cursing had died away, and the heavy figure of his first opponent was soft and motionless under him, and the Saint dropped his gun. His right hand reached over his shoulder and grasped the new assailant by the neck.
“Excuse me, Heimie,” said the Saint, rather breathlessly, “I’m busy.”
He got one knee up and lifted, pulling downwards with his right hand. Heimie Felder was dragged slowly from the ground; his torso came gradually over the Saint’s shoulder, and then the Saint turned his wrist and straightened his legs with a quick jerk, and Heimie shot over and downwards and hit the ground with his head. Apart from that solid and soporific thump, he made no sound, and silence settled down once more upon the scene.
The Saint dusted his clothes and repossessed himself of his automatic. He wiped it carefully on Heimie’s silk handkerchief, ejected the dud cartridge which had caused all the trouble, and replenished the magazine. Then he went in search of the parcel which had stimulated so much unfriendly argument, and carried it back to his car without a second glance at the two sleeping warriors by the roadside.
CHAPTER SIX:
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR INTERVIEWED MR INSELHEIM AND DUTCH KUHLMANN WEPT
1
It seems scarcely necessary to explain that Mr Ezekiel Inselheim was a Jew. He was a stoutish man with black hair surrounding a shiny bald pate, pleasant brown eyes, and a rather attractive smile, but his nose would have driven Hitler into frenzies of belligerent Aryanism. Confronted by that shamelessly Semitic proboscis, no well-trained Nazi could ever have been induced to believe that he was a kindly and honest man, shrewd without duplicity, self-made without arrogance, wealthy without offensive ostentation. It has always been difficult for such wild possibilities to percolate into the atrophied brain-cells of second rate crusaders, and a thousand years of self-styled civilisation have made no more improvements in the Nordic crank than they have in any other type of malignant half-wit.
He sat slumping wearily before the table in his library. The white light of his desk lamp made his sallow face appear even paler than it was naturally; his hands were resting on the blotter in front of him, clenched into impotent fists, and he was staring at them with a dull, almost childish hurt creasing deep grooves into the flesh on either side of his mouth.
Upstairs, his daughter slept peacefully, resting again in her own bed with the careless confidence of childhood, and for that privilege he had been compelled to pay the price. In spite of the fact that that strange Robin Hood of the twentieth century who was called the Saint had brought her back to him without a fee, Inselheim knew that the future safety of the girl still depended solely on his own ability to meet the payments demanded of him. He knew that his daughter had been kidnapped as a warning rather than for actual ransom, knew that there were worse weapons than kidnapping which the Terror would not hesitate to employ at the next sign of rebellion; if he had ever had any doubts on that score, they had been swept away by the cold guttural voice which had spoken to him over the telephone that morning, and it was the knowledge of those things that clenched his unpractised fists at the same time as that dull bitter pain of helplessness darkened his eyes.
Ezekiel Inselheim was wondering, as others no less rich and famous had wondered before him, why it was that in the most materially civilised country in the world an honoured and peaceful citizen had still to pay toll to a clique of organised bandits, like medieval peasants meeting the extortions of a feudal barony. He was wondering, with a grim intensity of revolt, why the police, who were so impressively adept at handing out summonses for traffic violations, and delivering perjured testimony against unfortunate women, were so plaintively incapable of holding the racketeers in check. And he knew the answers only too well.
He knew, as all America knew, that with upright legislators, with incorruptible police and judiciary, the gangster would long ago have vanished like the Western bad man. He knew that without the passive co-operation of a resigned and leader-less public, without the inbred cowardice of a terrorised population, the racketeers and the grafting political leaders who protected them could have been wiped off the face of the American landscape at a cost of one hundredth part of the tribute which they exacted annually. It was the latter part of that knowledge which carved the stunned hurt lines deeper into his face and whitened the skin across his fleshy fists. It gave him back none of the money which had been bled out of him, returned him no jot of comfort or security, filled him with nothing but a cancerous ache of degradation which was curdling into a futile trembling agony of hopeless anger. If, at that moment, any of his extortioners had appeared before him, he would have tried to stand up and defy them, knowing that there could be only one outcome to his lonely pitiful resistance…
And it was at that instant that some sixth sense made him turn his head, with a gasp of fear wrenched from sheer overwrought nerves strangling in his throat.
A languid immaculate figure lolled gracefully on the window-sill, one leg flung carelessly into the room, the other remaining outside in the cool night. A pair of insolent blue eyes were inspecting him curiously, and a smile with a hint of mockery in it moved the gay lips of the stranger. It was a smile with humour in it which was not entirely humorous, blue eyes with an amused twinkle which did not belong to any conventional amusement. The voice, when it spoke, had a bantering lilt, but beneath the lilt was something harder and colder than Inselheim had ever heard before—something that reminded him of chilled steel glinting under a polar moon.
“Hullo, Zeke,” said the Saint.
At the sound of that voice the pathetic mustering of anger drained out of Inselheim as if a stop-cock had been opened, leaving nothing but a horrible blank void. Upstairs was his child—sleeping…And suddenly he was only a frightened old man again, staring with fear-widened eyes at the revival of the menace which was tearing his self-respect into shreds.
“I’ve paid up!” he gasped hysterically. “What do you want? I’ve paid! Why don’t you leave me alone—”
The Saint swung his other leg into the room and hitched himself nonchalantly off the sill.
“Oh, no, you haven’t,” he said gravely. “You haven’t paid up at all, brother.”
“But I have paid!” The broker’s voice was wild, the words tumbling over each other in the ghastly incoherence of panic. “Something must have gone wrong, I paid…I paid tonight, just as you told me to. There must be some mistake. It isn’t my fault. I paid—”
Simon’s hands went to his pockets. From the breast pocket of his coat, the side pockets, the pockets of his trousers, he produced bundle after bundle of neatly-stacked fifty-dollar bills, tossing them one by one on to the desk in an apparently inexhaustible succession, like a conjurer producing rabbits out of a hat.
“There’s your money, Zeke,” he remarked cheerfully. “Ninety thousand bucks, if you want to count it, I allotted myself a small reward of ten thousand, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a very modest commission. So you see you haven’t paid up at all.”
Inselheim gaped at the heaps of money on the desk with a thrill of horror. He made no attempt to touch it. Instead, he stared at the Saint, and there was a numbness of stark terror in his eyes.
“Where…where did you get this?”
“You dropped it, I think,” explained the Saint easily. �
�Fortunately I was behind you. I picked it up. You mustn’t mind my blowing in by the fire-escape—I’m just fond of a little variety now and again. Luckily for you,” said the Saint virtuously, “I am an honest man, and money never tempts me—much. But I’m afraid you must have a lot more dough than is good for you, Zeke, if the only way you can think of to get rid of it is to go chucking scads of it around the scenery like that.”
Inselheim swallowed hard. His face had gone chalk-white.
“You mean you…you picked this up where I dropped it?”
Simon nodded.
“That was the impression I meant to convey. Perhaps I didn’t make myself very clear. When I saw you heaving buckets of potatoes over the horizon in that absent-minded sort of way—”
“You fool!” Inselheim said, with quivering lips. “You’ve killed me—that’s what you’ve done. You’ve killed my daughter!” His voice rose in a hoarse tightening of dread. “If they didn’t get this money—they’ll kill!”
Simon raised his eyebrows. He sat on the arm of a chair.
“Really?” he asked, with faint interest.
“My God!” groaned the man. “Why did you have to interfere? What’s this to you, anyway? Who are you?”
The Saint smiled.
“I’m the little dicky-bird,” he said, “who brought your daughter back last time.”
Inselheim sat bolt upright.
“The Saint!”
Simon bowed his acknowledgment. He stretched out a long arm, pulled open the drawer of the desk in which long experience had taught him that cigars were most often to be found, and helped himself.
“You hit it, Zeke. The bell rings, and great strength returns the penny. This is quite an occasion, isn’t it?” He pierced the rounded end of the cigar with a deftly wielded matchstick, reversed the match, and scraped fire from it with his thumbnail, ignoring the reactions of his astounded host. “In the circumstances, it may begin to dawn on you presently why I have that eccentric partiality to fire-escapes.” He blew smoke towards the ceiling, and smiled again. “I guess you owe me quite a lot, Zeke, and if you’ve got a spot of good Bourbon to go with this I wouldn’t mind writing it off your account.”
Inselheim stared at him for a long moment in silence. The cumulative shocks which had struck him seemed to have deadened and irised down the entrances of his mind, so that the thoughts that seethed in the anterooms of consciousness could only pass through one by one. But one idea came through more strongly and persistently than any other.
“I know,” he said, with a dull effort. “I’m sorry. I…I guess I owe you…plenty. I won’t forget it. But…you don’t understand. If you want to help me, you must get out. I’ve got to think. You can’t stay here. If they found you were here…they’d kill us both.”
“Not both,” said the Saint mildly.
He looked at Inselheim steadily, with a faintly humorous interest, like a hardened dramatic critic watching with approval the presentation of a melodrama, yet realising with a trace of self-mockery that he had seen it all before. But it was the candid appraisement in his gaze which stabbed mercilessly into some lacerated nerve that was throbbing painfully away down in the depths of the Jew’s crushed and battered fibre—a swelling nerve of contempt for his own weakness and inadequacy, the same nerve whose mute and inarticulate reactions had been clenching his soft hands into those pitifully helpless fists before the Saint came. The clear blue light of those reckless bantering eyes seemed to illumine the profundities of Inselheim’s very soul, but the light was too sudden and strong, and his own vision was still too blurred, for him to be able to see plainly what the light showed.
“What did you come here for?” Inselheim asked, and Simon blew one smoke-ring and put another through the centre of it.
“To return your potatoes—as you see. To have a cigar, and that drink which you’re so very inhospitably hesitating to provide. And to see if you might be able to help me.”
“How could I help you? If it’s money you want—”
“I could have helped myself.” The Saint glanced at the stacks of money on the desk with one eyebrow cocked and a glimmer of pure enjoyment in his eye. “I seem to be getting a lot of chances like that these days. Thanks all the same, but I’ve got one millionaire grubstaking me already, and his bank hasn’t failed yet. No—what I might be able to use from you, Zeke, is a few heart-to-heart confidences.”
Inselheim shook his head slowly, a movement that seemed to be more of an automatic than a deliberate refusal.
“I can’t tell you anything.”
Simon glanced at his wrist-watch.
“A rather hasty decision,” he murmured. “Not to say flattering. For all you know, I may be ploughing through life in a state of abysmal ignorance. However, you’ve got plenty of time to change your mind…”
The Saint rose lazily from his chair and stood looking downwards at his host, without a variation in the genial leisureliness of his movements or the cool suaveness of his voice, but it was a lazy leisureliness, a cool geniality, that was more impressive than any noisy dominance.
“You know, Zeke,” he rambled on affably, “to change one’s mind is the mark of a liberal man. It indicates that one has assimilated wisdom and experience. It indicates that one is free from stubbornness and pride and pimples and other deadly sins. Even scientists aren’t dogmatic anymore—they’re always ready to admit they were wrong and start all over again. A splendid attitude, Zeke—splendid…”
He was standing at his full height, carelessly dynamic like a cat stretching itself, but he had made no threatening movement, said nothing menacing…nothing.
“I’m sure you see the point, Zeke,” he said, and for some reason that had no outward physical manifestation, Inselheim knew that the gangsters whom he feared and hated could never be more ruthless than this mild-mannered young man with the mocking blue eyes who had clambered through his window such a short while ago.
“What could I tell you?” Inselheim asked tremulously.
Simon sat on the edge of the desk. There was neither triumph nor self-satisfaction in his air—nothing to indicate that he had ever even contemplated any other ultimate response. His gentleness was almost that of a psychoanalyst extracting confessions from a nervous patient, and once again Inselheim felt that queer light illuminating hidden corners of himself which he had not asked to see.
“Tell me all, Zeke,” said the Saint.
“What is there you don’t know?” Inselheim protested weakly. “They kidnapped Viola because I refused to pay the protection money—”
“The protection money,” Simon repeated idly. “Yes, I knew about that. But at least we’ve got started. Carry on, Uncle.”
“We’ve all got to pay for protection. There’s no way out. You brought Viola back, but that hasn’t saved her. If I don’t pay now—they’ll kill. You know that. I told you. What else is there—”
“Who are they?” asked the Saint.
“I don’t know.”
Simon regarded him quizzically.
“Possibly not.” Under the patient survey of those unillusioned eyes, the light in Inselheim’s subconsciousness was very bright. “But you must have some ideas. At some time or another, there must have been some kind of contact. A voice didn’t speak out of the ceiling and tell you to pay. And even a bloke with as many potatoes as you have doesn’t go scattering a hundred grand across the countryside just because some maniac he’s never heard of calls up on the phone and tells him to. That’s only one of the things I’m trying to get at. I take it that you don’t want to go on paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars to this unknown voice till the next new moon. I take it that you don’t want to spend the rest of your life wondering from day to day what the next demand is going to be—and wondering what they’ll do to your daughter to enforce it. I take it that you want a little peace and quiet—and that even beyond that you might like to see some things in this city changed. I take it that you have some manhood that goes deeper than
merely wearing trousers, and I’m asking you to give it a chance.”
Inselheim swallowed hard. The light within him was blinding, hurting his eyes. It terrified him. He rose as if in sheer nervousness and paced the room.
Simon watched him curiously. He knew the struggle that went on inside the man, and after a fashion he sympathised…And then, as Inselheim reached the far wall, his hand shot out and pressed a button. He turned and faced the Saint defiantly.
“Now,” he said, with a strange thickness in his voice, “get out! That bell calls one of my guards. I don’t wish you any harm—I owe you everything—for a while. But I can’t—I can’t sign my own death-warrant—or Viola’s…”
“No,” said the Saint softly. “Of course not.”
He hitched himself unhurriedly off the desk and walked to the window. There, he threw a long leg across the sill, and his unchanged azure eyes turned back to fix themselves on Inselheim.
“Perhaps,” he said quietly, “you’ll tell me the rest another day.”
The broker shook his head violently.
“Never,” he gabbled. “Never. I don’t want to die. I won’t tell anything. You can’t make me. You can’t!”
A heavy footstep sounded outside in the hall. Inselheim stood staring, his chest heaving breathlessly, his mouth half open as if aghast at the meaning of his own words, his hands twitching. The light in his mind had suddenly burst. He looked for contempt, braced himself for a retort that would shrivel the last of his pride, and instead saw nothing in the Saint’s calm eyes but a sincere and infinite compassion that was worse than the bitterest derision. Inselheim gasped, and his stomach was suddenly empty as he realised that he had thrown everything away.
But the Saint looked at him and smiled.
“I’ll see you again,” he said, and then, as a knock came on the door and the guard’s voice demanded an answer, he lowered himself briskly to the fire-escape landing and went on his way.
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 13
